IHH

Turkey is sponsoring the jihadists, not guarding against them.

Hamas are resistance fighters who are struggling to defend their land. They have won an election. I have told this to U.S. officials ... I do not accept Hamas as a terrorist organization. I think the same today. They are defending their land.

That would be Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking before an exultant crowd a few weeks ago in the city of Konya as a newly decorated defender of regional Islamism. This is the man whom David Cameron was out to please the other day when, in a speech delivered in Ankara, he referred to Gaza as a “prison camp,” assailed Israel’s raid on the Mavi Marmara as “completely unacceptable,” and insisted that despite the aura of hopelessness now clinging to Turkey’s agonized bid to join the European Union, it must join it whatever the grumblings from Germany and France. Brutal occupation of Cyprus, subjugation of a Kurdish minority in everything from politics to linguistics, and ongoing denial of the Armenian genocide are evidently Maastricht-compatible initiatives to the new British prime minister, considered even by his support base not to “do” foreign policy so terribly well.

That didn’t stop a fellow Conservative, MEP Daniel Hannan, from encouraging Cameron’s Obama-like overture to an increasingly hostile and subversive ally: “Cameron's reasons for backing Ankara's bid for EU membership are solidly Tory: Turkey guarded Europe's flank against the Bolshevists for three generations, and may one day be called on to do the same against the jihadis.”

Except that Turkey is sponsoring the jihadists, not guarding against them—a fact which ought to have been clear to Cameron in the post-script news coverage to the flotilla crisis. The best look into Turkey’s turn toward radicalism has been provided by independent Turkish journalists who have for months been arguing that Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) is leading the country into the asphyxiating embrace of the East. The Islamist “lite” party, which won power in 2002, used to adhere to a policy of “zero problems with the neighbors;” today it prefers one of helping the neighbors cause problems with the West.

Consider AKP’s relationship with IHH, the Turkish “charity” that was behind the well-planned assault of Israeli commandos on board the Mavi Marmara, a ship that, it always bears repeating, carried no humanitarian aid cargo whatsoever. (Its upper-deck personnel, on the other hand, were armed and individually loaded with bundles of cash yet no forms of identification. If not jihadist by avocation, they certainly dressed the part.)

IHH, which was founded in 1992 and registered as a charity three years later, has undergone a series of transformations over the past two decades. It started out under the pretext of providing social services to the Muslim community (building mosques, helping orphans) but swiftly came under suspicion for being a liaison to al Qaeda. It has finally found a role it’s proud to own, that of being an Anatolian philanthropy for Hamas. (Ironically, Turkish authorities before the Erdogan era were the ones who did the most to scrutinize the NGO; so intense was the legal pressure brought to bear on IHH that it was even prohibited from contributing to Turkish earthquake relief efforts in 1999 and its funds were frozen in Istanbul by the then governor of the city.)

Dealing with radicals.

The provocative anti-Israel posture of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the AKP firebrand, appears to have lost some favor within Turkey itself. But how about among the two and a half million Turkish immigrants and their descendants in Germany? Could Turkish Muslims in Western Europe, under AKP influence, become a major, new focus of radicalism?

The widespread condemnation Europeans have expressed toward Israel after its commandos boarded the so-called peace flotilla on May 31 - and used force only when threatened with death - signals a desire to turn every Israeli action of self-defense into absolution for the crimes of the Holocaust.

A journalist's trip to the headquarters of the extremist group that sponsored the Mavi Marmara.

The street outside the IHH, the Turkish organization that recently dispatched the Mavi Marmara to its sanguinary fate in the eastern Mediterranean, suggests a hopeful world of multi-ethnic and religious harmony. Men and women in various forms of secular and religious dress—beards, clean-shaven, headscarves, burqas—walk in and out of the building in urgent conversation with Africans in dashikis, Swedes in stained proletarian-wear, anti-Zionist rabbis sweating nervously in black suits and payot. A gangly teenager strolls by in a T-shirt that reads, “Virgins required: No experience necessary.” It isn’t clear whether he’s off-message, highly ironic, or yet another Turkish kid who bought a T-shirt he didn’t quite understand.

A think tank report gives the Islamist leaning country too much credit.

A newly released policy report on Turkey by the German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Academy in Washington caught my eye this week. The report was dubbed, “Getting to Zero: Turkey, Its Neighbors and the West,” and the brief’s analysis and policy recommendations unfortunately display a distinct pro-Turkish bias which fails to recognize that Ankara’s aggressive foreign and security policy posture is increasingly at odds with core U.S. and European interests.

Evidence of the flotilla organizer’s terror ties continues to mount.

The Associated Press has published its account of an interview with France’s former top counterterrorism judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere. In the late 1990s, Bruguiere investigated the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief. The group is better known by its Turkish acronym, the IHH. This is the group that organized the flotilla that was interdicted by Israeli forces earlier this week.

The International Muslim Brotherhood had a heavy hand in orchestrating the flotilla.

Western press accounts have enumerated the many left-wing human rights activists who were among the Gaza-bound flotilla’s passengers earlier this week. But there were other, more conspicuous passengers aboard the ships. The Muslim Brotherhood, in particular, was well-represented.

The convoy of ships allegedly trying to bring aid to the Gaza Strip was organized by a group belonging to an officially designated terrorist organization.

The Turkish organizers of the Gaza Strip-bound flotilla that was boarded this morning by Israeli commandos knew well in advance that their vessels would never reach Israeli waters. That's because the organizers belong to a nonprofit that was banned by the Israeli government in July 2008 for its ties to terrorism finance.